The current infrastructure for Point to Multi-Point Communications on such as ATM and IP commonly have drawbacks that this invention addresses. When one sends a IP or UPD packet the arrival of the packet at the destination is not guaranteed. This has become known as “fire it and forget it” transmission. The problem is that many types of communication protocols are also “fire and forget it” type of transmissions. Reliability is accomplished by best effort, and security is not addressed by the protocol at all. The solution is to create a new protocol (set of rules) that uses the existing infrastructure to create a secure, reliable, and scalable “one to many” transmission solution. While there may be many schemes to provide reliability and security to the Internet, these types of new protocols fail to be inter-operable.
Presently communications are a mixture of point to point and point to multi-point infrastructure. In a virtual sense communication protocols have supported both using sophisticated algorithms to form bridges and trees where necessary. These methods are not uniform and make it almost impossible to take advantage of point to multi-point infrastructure where it is available. This is because bridging from open point to multi-point using closed point to point must encapsulate the point to multi-point data resurfacing the data where point-to multi-point communications can have advantage.
FIG. 1 shows a system that encapsulates messages in order to create an embedded list of destinations for multipoint transmission. This system is used for Small Group Multicasting because this list can only accommodate a finite number of addresses.